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Monday, May 28, 2012

Things seem so random all of a sudden, and time feels like it’s
speeding up.

—Mad Men, Season 5, “Signal
30”

The ideological arm of Lower Quality
Translation, also known as the Common Sense Advisory (CSA), has published yet
another dubious white paper on the
translation market, enticingly entitled “Translation Demand-Supply
Mismatch.” Thankfully, the organization charges a lot for its full-length
reports, so peasants such as the writer of this humble blog are left to peruse
only the public summaries. This allows us to devote the precious few moments
left on this Earth to more profitable pursuits, such as the latest slutty
exploits of those crazy Kardashians or that never-ending cliff dive known as
the Spanish equity market. The CSA does push the low quality envelope a little
aggressively, though, but, after all, their audience certainly is not little old yours
truly. Their stuff is aimed more at the larger translation agencies that
disguise themselves as technology companies and perhaps the odd middling sort of
agency that dreams of making it to The Show.

Anyhow, in the fragmented age of the
Internet, some of its stuff winds up on my iPad and the ease of blog publishing
allows me to kick the tires a little bit. The first surprising takeaway of
“Translation Supply-Demand Mismatch” is pretty breathtaking: The law of supply
and demand isn’t applicable to the translation industry.

To start off, the author cites three
factors that are constraining supply.

The first one is that old chestnut (say it
with me) known as the Content Tsunami. I have played enough with this faulty concept to trot
it out and flog it again. Let sleeping, defunct horses lie.

The second factor is a shrinking supply of
translators. Really? Based on what evidence? Hmmm, “executives at language
service providers (LSPs) regularly tell us…” That is called hearsay evidence in
a court of law.

Thirdly, “translator productivity has
stagnated.” This is a very strange way to put it that reveals an entire
underlying agenda:

In
the survey we conducted for this report, we found that individual translators
averaged just 2,684 words every day. This number hasn’t changed much for
decades, if not centuries.

Okay, De Palma has proven that supply is
constrained (I guess…). Let’s take that as a given. The expectation would be
that translation prices are soaring at a rate that zips past Zimbabwean
inflation rates (cha-ching!). But no (crushing disappointment):

With
such a classic case of high demand and inadequate supply [please note this elegant example of question begging], prices would rise, much to the delight of
LSPs and freelance translators… However, we don’t see widespread rate increases
any time soon, given the price sensitivity of the language sector and tight
budgets at companies stockpiling cash.

What? The laws of supply and demand don’t
apply to the translation sector? Really? That’s fascinating! You could get a
Nobel Prize by demonstrating why that happens! Do, please, tell me more!

But Mr. De Palma has other more pressing
business to take care of than the teensy weensy little detail that one of the
most basic laws of the social sciences just doesn’t have any relevance to
the area of the economy he analyzes. Because he is, after all, too busy frying
other fish. McFishsticks, to be more precise. Yes, the lack of pertinence of
one of the most basic laws that describe economic reality merits less than a
passing mention, because now we are into the nitty gritty of where we wanted to
go: “Some informed companies and
specialists intelligently apply MT and other translation automation to the
problem.” A clunky sentence? Perhaps. Completely misguided? Possibly. A
ringing endorsement of cheap translation? You bet your ass! This is followed by
a reference to a discarded guru from the 1970s who mistakenly thought that by
now we would be colonizing Jupiter. All of this crowned with an admonition that
the world is changing way too fast and that he who doesn’t adapt risks being
left behind by the dizzying rate of innovation at companies such as Trados and
Lionbridge:

we
expect that many buyers and suppliers will merely react to the changes rather
than permanently change their behaviors. If they can step back from their
day-to-day issues, though, they will see that the market for language services
market has fundamentally changed. Once a cottage industry, language has become
a core business process and critical enabler for a range of economic,
political, and humanitarian activities – and subject to all the attendant
macroeconomic pressures. Some participants will be unnerved by so many changes
in such as a short time, leading to the displacement that sociologists labeled
“future shock.“ To survive, they will have to adapt to the new realities and
economics of language services.

So, please, translators, take a step back. Please.
I beg you. Be careful. You might get some of this future schlock on your shoes.
Yuck.

Some of you may be familiarized with Alvin
Toffler’s Future Shock idea. The
latest season of Mad Men plays a lot with
the unease that Americans felt in the mid-sixties. The fear was that the world
was changing a lot faster than the speed at which an individual could assimilate
it. In Mad Men’s case, it is not so
much because of technology, admittedly; the vertigo felt by the characters is punctuated
mostly by famous crimes, such as the U of T at Austin sniper and the nurse
massacre in Chicago. Half a decade after Pete Campbell was having sexy
fantasies about the daughter from The
Gilmore Girls, Toffler put the finger on that unease, called it future
shock, and made a bundle of money explaining this anxiety to the general public.
Anyone who is around forty has found that book lying somewhere in the
bookshelves of every household he visits. However, what Mad Men is pointing at is social
change. As the United States becomes more fragmented socially, racially,
generationally and sexually, the world begins to look a lot scarier and less
integrated. That is the subject of a lot of pre-post-modernist literature. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. But technological determinists take another, slightly different, view: chiefly, that it
is technology that is driving everything. And technological determinism, as I
have pointed out often, is our sad, secular religion.

Now, note that to state that the rate of
social change is speeding up is not exactly a world-changing perception. We can
all pretty much agree on that. However, the prediction that this rate is only set to speed up to a point
where we all go insane (i.e., that it is exponential) is quite another
thing. As a recent reporter who visited
Toffler writes:

Still,
the accelerating change doesn't seem to be driving people crazy, as was
predicted by Future Shock. Alvin Toffler says it may be that younger
generations have simply become more adapted to change, that it is their
culture. Academic futurist Stuart Candy says the Tofflers were wrong to predict
widespread "future shock," as a form of societal illness or
breakdown.

So, let me see… Future 1-Toffler 0. Shocker!
(Schlocker?) And yet, forty years on, sub-gurus are still peddling this as a
diagnosis for people trudging through the Great Stagnation. (Which prompts one
question: Why, if the world is changing so quickly, is a book from four decades
ago still relevant? After all, Adam Smith apparently isn’t relevant, since
demand and supply is obsolete. Why should Toffler remain pertinent to our madcap
era of flying cars and weekend trips to Mars?)

But all of this is deceptive. We have arrived
at this point by conceding the premises of Mr. De Palma’s faulty analysis.
Let’s go back to some of his more eyebrow-raising observations. Chiefly, that
the dynamics of supply and demand don’t apply to translation. If true, that
should blow you away like a tornado. But, as noted, the author glides blithely by.

Imagine a naturalist who passes by an
elephant with a giraffe neck and says: “Wow! That’s kind of weird! It contradicts
everything we know about evolution
and the animal kingdom. But, wait, look over there! Is that a new Krispy Kreme?
Wow! In the middle of the bush? That’s even more awesome!”

Or imagine your friend giving you a tour of
his new five-bedroom house. “And this is the guest room. However, the law of
gravity doesn’t apply here, for whatever reason.” You peer inside and see a
bed, a dresser and a cocker spaniel floating around in zero gravity. What would
you do? Would you follow your friend out to the garden to have cocktails as the
furniture and the dog float round and round? Or would you devote your entire
life to finding out why the law of gravity doesn’t hold in your friend’s guest bedroom?

I wonder. Is it possible that a lot
of the “empirical” observations about supply constraint are not really based on
any concrete studies? Maybe. Is it possible that the translation market is
incredibly inefficient, as I have often preached from this digital pulpit?
Hmmmm, perhaps. Is it possible that the enormous spectrum in which translation
prices float is due to massive information gaps? You know, that’s possible. Or
is it perhaps also the influence of the commodity thesis that is explicitly
or implicitly held by a lot of buyers and sellers of translation? You know what,
now that you mention it, that might
be part of it. That surely does not mean that supply and demand doesn’t apply. Only that a slightly more informed analysis is needed that employs the tools of
very traditional microeconomics. Also, a consultation of slightly less outdated
gurus might come in handy. Unfortunately, none of these avenues of inquiry
would help Mr. De Palma sell more reports.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Quick. A bat and a ball cost $1.10
together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Come on, come on.

Hurry up, answer.

Was your answer that the ball costs $0.10?
That answer is wrong. If the ball
cost $0.10 and the bat cost $1.00 more (i.e. $1.10), then together they would
cost $1.20. For the bat and the ball to cost $1.10 together, the ball has to
cost $0.05. (Did that just blow your mind?)

Don’t worry, I didn’t get it right either.
Even years after I first heard this test, every time I hear it I still have to
stop and work out mentally why this is. Getting it wrong doesn’t reflect badly
on your intelligence, just on your condition as a hairless ape. Faced with a
similar problem, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that even after knowing the correct
answer, “a little homunculus in my head
continues to jump up and down, shouting at me” the wrong answer. It is just
that deceptively simple arithmetical exercises like this are done by the
intuitive, quick-thinking part of your brain. If the problem used less round or
larger numbers, you would be less likely to go wrong. Because then you would
mobilize the more sophisticated—but lazier—part of your brain that makes more
complex mathematical calculations.

The preceding brain teaser is an ingenious
demonstration of cognitive biases (or malfunctions) that are built into our
brains. The slower, lazier System 2 that lumbers along slowly to make
calculations is a very recent product of evolution. Most of the time, our
System 1 is in charge, which we share with other animals. It is quick,
unreflective and superficial, because its main job is to flee predators and
find food.

I’m reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast
and Slow, an introduction by the Nobel-winning psychologist into
the study of the systematic mental biases that dominate a significant part of
our interaction with the world. Together with fellow Israeli psychologist Amos
Tversky, Kahneman revolutionized the field of economics five decades ago by
turning the idea of rational choice on its head.

One of the main quirks of the brain that
these academics discovered is the phenomenon of anchoring. In experiments, it
has been demonstrated that people who have been shown arbitrary numbers are
influenced to use these numbers in making subsequent calculations that have
absolutely nothing to do with the original number.

One example: a group of people see a wheel
of fortune with numbers being spun. It always lands on 65. Then they are asked
what percentage of the countries in the UN is African. On average, they respond
45%. A different group that is shown a wheel that always lands on 15 respond on
average 25% to the same question. This means that even numbers which people
know are random have an impact on their subsequent mental calculations. This
anchoring effect has been demonstrated over and over in many different
contexts. Some are funny: MBA students are told to recite their college ID
number and it has an effect on different estimates they are asked to make.
Others are more chilling: Judges are told to roll two dice and then sentence
people for a misdemeanor. Systematically, the judges who rolled low numbers
sentenced people to a couple of months, while higher rolls corresponded to sentences
of seven months or more.

Leaving aside the disturbing aspects of our
irrationality, it makes sense to exploit the phenomenon of anchoring when
negotiating rates. Regardless of whether your initial rate is accepted or not,
your opening proposal will act as an anchor on a negotiation. Moreover,
regardless of where you start the negotiation, your counterpart will be keen on
achieving a reduction. Conclusion: never start with the minimum at which you
would do the project. Start at a high rate, because the client may ask for a
reduction (and perhaps even need it psychologically). Give yourself leeway to
reduce the rate a little in case you have to drop it a little to give the other
person the illusion that he or she is a savvy negotiator. The use of anchoring
is win-win. If you have to lower your original high bid, you still get to work
at a rate that is acceptable to you, and the other party feels satisfied after
having obtained a “discount.” If your original high offer is accepted, you get
to work at a rate that is more than satisfactory for you.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Is
the language barrier an obstacle to knowledge? People with technologically
oriented minds would immediately respond in the affirmative. They are
frustrated by the language barrier. They feel it is irrational. They equate
immediate access to every single bit of information as liberating.

I’m
not saying that the language barrier is a good thing or a bad thing. All I
would caution is that the belief that it is the cause of ignorance or underdevelopment is perhaps accepted
uncritically by supporters of what one might euphemistically call “language
technology.”

A
late chapter in The Shallows analyzes
the attitude of Google’s founders toward information. Brin and Page are,
famously, computer engineers. In Ken Auletta’s phrase, “Google's leaders are
not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers.” Of course, the dominant ideology
of Silicon Valley in 2012 consists in invoking lofty goals for very non-lofty
business models. For instance, universal access to information is invoked as
the end, and the means is the sale of (slightly tawdry) online text ads. The
cure for cancer is invoked as the ultimate goal for selling mp3s, etc., etc. Which
prompts the question, if the ultimate goal is to cure cancer: why not, uhm,
devote your life to cancer research? Inquiring minds might want to know. But
you’ll never get a response.

Google’s goal is, as former CEO Eric Schmidt famously wrote, to “gather together
all of the information in the world in a single place.” The current dispersal
of information is an obstacle to knowledge, and that is true, to some extent
The key linkage between the Googlevi’s engineering backgrounds and the ambition
of digitizing every single bit of information boils down to efficiency of access and distribution.

Now, I would like to make a heretical assumption: perhaps the language barrier is not
as much of a barrier to science as one would imagine. For almost a millennium
after the fall of Rome, Latin was the lingua franca of learning in the Western
world. The fragmentation of the Tower of Babel only entered the ivory tower of science until well after the Scientific Revolution was underway, probably due to the
influence of the ever-increasing power of nationalism and the Reformation, but also because of the
growing importance of science itself and the desire to get out from under the
constraints of Thomism, the heavy legacy of the Middle Ages, and its exclusive use
of Latin. Perhaps if Latin had remained as the lingua franca of letters and
science, we would be further along the path of progress today, but I doubt it. The
movement away from a single pan-European language of knowledge that knitted
together scholars from Toledo to Warsaw was in part due to
factors such as the Reformation and the rise of nationalism. But it was also
due to the fact that the gentleman-scientist of the seventeenth century need not have
attended the major learning centres of his time. The exclusive use of the common
Latin language for learning might have actually shut out these individuals from
the pursuit of scientific truth. Or it may have loaded up a scholar with a lot
of prejudices about language and thought that were inconvenient.

In
our day, English is the lingua franca of science. I find it hard to believe
that the language barrier is a problem when a pre-requisite for being a
scientist is to be fluent in English. And, let’s face it, the only type of
knowledge that is crucial for the advancement of
humanity is scientific. Helping sailors maintain email correspondence with the
cutie they met at the last port may help humanity somewhat, but not as much as
a cure for malaria. (Would it be churlish to ask to which of the two
Cheap Localization has contributed more over the past decade, I wonder?)

If
English as a lingua franca for science leaves you unconvinced, listen to this
argument about how connectedness inhibits inventiveness. This more
sophisticated counterargument comes from novelist Neal Stephenson.
It is a parable of how interconnectedness depresses innovation:

Most people who work in
corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number
of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out
of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some
laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search,
announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely
similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it
failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending
money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the
market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it
will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.”
The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must
number in the millions.

So
is efficient information exchange a pure good? Not necessarily. Sometimes, the
walled garden and the solipsistic bubble are crucial for creation and innovation.
Think about Descartes in his man-sized oven. Or Proust in his sound-proof
bedroom. The absence of space for unmolested invention may be part of the
reason for our current Great Stagnation, pace naïve connectivists such as Mark
Zuckerberg and his legion of wannabes.

The amount
of information flow does not produce qualitative
jumps in our knowledge or social wealth. Our current period is marked by the fastest transmission of the largest amount of information ever amassed in the history of mankind, and yet its is also marked by the slowest economic growth in many decades.The Scientific Revolution came after the invention of the press, but it
was not caused by the printing press,
as is wrongly believed by a lot of people who know exactly diddlysquat about
history. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is
a fallacy, but, as Roland Barthes wrote, it is the foundational premise of
narrative.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

(It wasn’t actually dinner with Renato but rather
lunch with Renato, but you know I can’t resist a meta-reference.) Readers of
this blog are aware I have a low opinion of Renato Beninatto’s take on a lot of
issues. The problem is that the world is a small place and eventually even he read
these snarky posts and started contacting me on Twitter and via this blog. I
basically pretended not to notice, because some of the stuff he says is so
outrageous that it provides easy fodder for a lot of blog posts. But he
insisted. He proposed a grand debate. I humbly begged off. My counter-offer was
that he should write a guest post on this blog. He declined, somewhat
predictably, excusing himself on the grounds of time constraints and that he
does not write that well. It was therefore a stand-off. However, he proposed
dinner in Madrid as one way out. I acceded, although as I said, I was very reluctant.
I knew that once you see pictures of someone’s kids, you can’t really be as
sarcastic as you once were. The problem is that if he did’nt exist, I might have
to invent him; he’s just that juicy. Nonetheless, I thought at least I owed him
a hearing. I knew that he was going to “sell” me. Sell me what, I was not sure.
But if he insisted, I could not in good conscience refuse all personal contact.
Nonetheless, I felt less like a berobed Alec Guinness going to meet David Prowse
than one of those writers in Po-Mo novels where an uneasy author meets one of
his characters.

We met for lunch last Tuesday. He was in
Madrid for a localization association’s networking event. The conversation was in Spanish, which he speaks fluently. He is a talker (not a
huge shock). He was not there to hear me out so much as to clarify his own
views. The main message he wanted to transmit was that he is not a carpetbagger.
He is a translator who pivoted by several degrees to the business side of
things. He launched into a detailed narration of his professional life, from a
business and economics degree, to his first job at a consultancy at which he also
did translations, to film subtitler (like me), to independent freelancer (like
me), to owner of a budding agency in Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American
Spanish, to executive for several large “multi-language vendors.” His career
spans a period in which translation transitioned from being a cottage industry
dominated by individuals and small companies to a slightly less fragmented cottage
industry in which much larger mid-caps provide outsourced language services to multinational
blue chips. I think a lot of his views are tied to his participation in that
transition.

I don’t dispute that he is an experienced
translator. Point taken. He is not a carpetbagger. Okay. Most of his views that
I have found questionable have to do with slightly superficial ideas about the
transformative power of technology. Surprisingly, that subject was barely
mentioned during a lengthy three-hour-long exchange. His attitude is that
technology is an adjunct and not as central an issue as many think, at least
from a business perspective (I think that is just a step away from my own
suspicion that translation technology is commoditized, but he did not go as far
as saying that). Another surprise is that he also expressed considerable
skepticism about crowdsourcing. Furthermore, when I asked him if he thought
that translation was a commodity, he did explicitly and flatly refute the idea.

Beyond personal biography, the message he
sought to sell me was that “we are not so different, you and I.” I concede we
are both Latin Americans of almost the same generation who drifted into
translation. We are both typical of a certain, recognizable middle-class type
of South American who comes from No-Place, raised and educated in several
countries, with two or three passports, two or more languages, and with
grandparents who hail from all over the globe. But I replied several times that
our views are indeed sharply different, and probably determined by our contrasting
positions within the industry. He is a born entrepreneur. I am not. He has
probably gambled his life savings on a wing and prayer a couple of times. I am by
nature risk averse. He feels frustrated that criticism of business as a dirty
thing is unfair. His view is that we cannot and should not demonize companies. I
agree with him on that, but that does not mean that sleazy businesses or shoddy
practices should not come in for criticism.

It is not so much the facts on which we are
divided. It is on the interpretation of those facts.

For instance, he is very enamored of the
argument that a call for all translators to try to get into the high-rate
sector is self-defeating. He drew a Gaussian curve on a napkin and told me that
if everyone in the overpopulated, hamsterized portion of the bell curve jumps
into the higher part of the curve, the better-paid freelancers would face
increasing competition. In my view, that is a very simplistic way of looking at
things. It assumes a perfect, undifferentiated market. In such a hypothetical (and
unlikely) case, I still don’t think other freelancers would be my competition.
Neither is Lionbridge, which is too large to be interested in the tiny
companies I serve. My concern is competition from junky small agencies that are
pure intermediaries for a so-so database, or perhaps a junky larger agency such
as Transperfect, which is very aggressive in competing at every price level and
for every single loose dollar drifting along out there (anywhere). No. I would
welcome more translators emigrating from the middle of the bell curve, because I
think a rising tide could well lift all boats.

Another challenge Renato posed: Do I think
all translators should charge homogenous (and high) rates? No, that is certainly
not my view either. A market should be stratified and diversified in order to
reflect different levels of service, specialization, and experience. I certainly
don’t think someone who just graduated should get the same compensation I get.
My view, though, is that the current state tends toward a curve that is far
more skewed to the left side of the distribution than is warranted. I see a lot
of highly qualified specialists struggling to make rent, or people living with
roommates well into their thirties. Not a pretty sight. A slight trend toward
the right side of the chart would not be a bad thing, in my view.

Another pointed challenge: Do I think there
should be an international brotherhood of translation teamsters demanding
standard wages? Not really. First of all, I don’t think it’s feasible in the
age of the Internet (except perhaps for interpreters), or even desirable. Rent seeking
is not a pretty sight. We have to accept the good that globalization brings in with
the bad: the former being access to a worldwide market, the latter being Lionbridge
and those annoying South Asian agencies who claim to do “native Spanish.” I
don’t think homogeneity is something professionals should strive for. (But even
if that were to happen, at least homogenous rates would relieve me from the
niggling worry [to which I’m sometimes prone] that I’m competing on price. It would allow
me to focus on differentiation.)

In response to the undesired homogenization,
I challenged him with this question: What is more valuable for a young
translator, to toil for years as a cog in a Very Large Translation Agency for
pennies a word, or to forego paid work and maybe get into a graduate program,
travel, take a course on specialized translation, or learn another language? He
saw no problem with spending your apprenticeship years in the commoditized sector.
I, on the other hand, don’t think there is much of a future in working for
faceless PMs you never meet or agencies who think translation is a commodity. So
that is another major difference.

On another issue, I asked him if he
sincerely believed that a translator could deliver 10,000 words a day of
high-quality, publishable material. He replied in the affirmative, but I was
surprised to learn that it turns out technology has little to do with it, in
his view. He confided in me that back in the eighties and nineties (when SMT
was not even a twinkle in the eye of Phil Ochs and post-editing was a typo),
his output was 7,000 words a day (he described his method as dictating into a
tape recorder which would then be transcribed by a typist). My interpretation
of this is as follows: A few productivity tweaks, whether from MT or TM or
whatever, should suffice to push the profession into five-digit daily outputs.
In other words, technology is a red herring. Renato countered by asking me what
my output was. I answered honestly that 7,000 words a day was a bridge too far
for me, but conceded that I had actually pumped out 5,000 words on many days.
With the caveat that I couldn’t do it for more than two weeks in a row before
being totally burned out. So you see, slight differences of opinion conceal
vastly different views of the profession.

Let me provide another example of differing
interpretations of the same facts. Renato said he had once been asked at an
event what output a translator could achieve in the future. He had replied with
typical bullishness that 30,000-35,000 words per day was a feasible number for
a translator in the Era of the Jetsons. I gasped (audibly): “That’s absurd! How
could you even proofread that output?!”
Undaunted, he went on to tell me that the day after he voiced that opinion, he had
logged onto his email to find an advertisement from a leading CAT tool designer
in which a translator gave a testimonial claiming that the tool had allowed her
to translate 32,000 words in a single
day. Once again, I blurted out: “That person doesn’t know what she’s talking
about! Thirty thousand or twenty-five thousand 100% matches do not count as words you translated!” That
person was completely misreading a technology she didn’t understand (and the
company was more than a little dishonest in publishing the testimonial). You
see what I mean about differing interpretations? For Beninatto, the incident is
a harbinger of a happy future marked by greater productivity. For me, it is a perfect
example of how translators are completely incapable of interpreting
technological change. Night and day. Day and night.

Regarding the “quality is dead” issue, he
explained that it is related to his view that quality as mere error detection
was the wrong view. He complained that the bandying about of his now infamous
title was unfortunate (which made me think to myself that perhaps a less
“provocative” title would have been in order; you can’t place a huge target on
your back, take a leisurely stroll through the Amazon jungle, and then complain
that the natives are aiming poisoned darts at you). I agree insofar as it means
that the TEP model in which proofreaders add a myriad of useless tweaks (and
often typos) is not efficient. However, my view is that such a model can work
well in small groups of professionals who work with each other. But scaling up
that model to larger and larger collectives or companies was a recipe for a lot
of trouble. And, incidentally, for hamsterization, a term that he criticizes as
impolite (I would reply that it is far more uncouth to deprofessionalize
people, but there you go).

No, our opinions are completely different.
I asked him point blank if he thought a translator should compete on price. He
said flatly no, that competing on price is suicidal. But I think where he
contradicts himself is that he often voiced the parallel message that not
everyone can aspire to the higher echelons of the market (which is self-evident
and not insightful) and that the lower-rate competitors will ultimately eat
your lunch.

To sum it up, I think his career represents
an example of the undeniable triumph of the drive to Cheap and Big. However, I
think Cheap as a pricing model might not be as successful over the next two
decades as it has been over the past two. Cheap is already running into
headwinds as the middle class in China gets larger and larger. Look at Latin
American currencies. They are appreciating at breakneck pace while the industrialized
world deleverages. Of course, the commodities boom will eventually go bust,
that is inherent to cycles. But take a look at Brazil’s or Colombia’s
international reserves. Dutch disease is deadly for cheap labor. Asians and
Latin Americans learned the painful lessons of the nineties (the Tequila
Effect, the Samba Effect, and those little episodes known as the Russian debt
default and the Asian financial crisis). They learned them rather well.

To illustrate the point, I mentioned the
anecdote about the late Steve Jobs and Obama at a dinner party held last year.
Obama asked the Apple CEO how the U.S. can bring back those factory jobs making
iPads. Jobs replied bluntly that those jobs are gone forever.
Beninatto knew the anecdote. His eyes brightened when I mentioned it, but I’m
sure that it’s because he misreads the anecdote. He thinks it confirms the
superiority of Cheap. But the founder of Apple wasn’t saying those jobs are
gone forever because Chinese salaries are dirt poor. His point was far more
subtle. Listen to why those salaries will never come back to the U.S.:

Another
critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the
United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about
8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000
assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The
company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find
that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In
China, it took 15 days.

Companies
like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical
work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with
more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at
that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but
the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

If the FoxConn jobs are fated to remain in
China, it is not because those engineers are cheap. They may earn less than
American engineers, but their country’s real advantage is ease of sourcing and abundance.
And that means skilled labor. It is a dramatic indication that China is
climbing up the value chain, just as Japan, Korea, and Chile did earlier. That
is something a member of a hamsterized work force is not doing. The anecdote does,
unfortunately, also spell the end of the highly paid American blue collar
worker, whose elegy is pictured in Michael Moore’s films. But it also spells
the rise of something equally revolutionary: the better-paid blue collar
Chinese worker and the well-paid, thrifty, and hyper-educated Chinese middle
class. More significantly, it also spells the end of something else: the demise
of Cheap as the main pillar of international business models. China’s edge is
now both volume-based AND strategic. An alert player should pick up his ears,
because the times they are a-changin’. That
is the real significance of the Jobs-Obama story.

As I assured him over and over,
I do not think he is an evil person, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find a
lot of his opinions completely erroneous, if not downright objectionable. Every
time I said that, he assured me with a little twinkle in his eye that, deep
down, we actually agree on more than I think. I could see readily that he is a
born salesman. Perhaps even too good. The dirty little secret about investment
banking is that, at heart, it is just sales. A trader, a VP, a guru-economist, even
a nerdy quant is really just a salesperson. But at Goldman Sachs, the capital sin
was to be “salesy,” which means being slightly too slick for your own good.

So, does the man have horns and a tail? No.
Does he smell of brimstone? No. He is a charming, affable person with a big
personality. However, if he gets flak from random bloggers, it is probably due
to his lack of awareness about the heterogeneity of the audiences you reach now
on the Internet. A message on a blog or a video uploaded to YouTube is pushed
out to an audience that is difficult to predict, much less control. That will
be the case until the Internet becomes a more textured place broken down into
apps or dominated by more regulated spaces unreachable via the flatness of the
search engine. I told him that. Once again, he completely brushed off this
suggestion. However, I reiterate my belief that if you venture out into the
Internet, you have to be prepared to be misunderstood. I write a niche blog
read by a tiny audience of 200 people, and the variety of reactions always runs
the gamut from utterly fascinating to completely baffling. We have to learn to
live with that.

So, in closing, I thank him for the invitation
to lunch. He was also gracious enough to invite me to the ELIA networking event
free of charge a couple of days later, an invitation I accepted. But
differences of opinion remain and don’t necessarily have to be drowned in bonhomie
and red wine, since they can be insightful. My two main messages, which I would
like to reiterate, is first of all that translation will probably come to be
dominated by a barbell, with large agencies on one end of the barbell and
cottage providers on the other. The contrasting views and philosophies of the
two extremes will become increasingly more divergent, a divergence which will
on occasion sound rather bitter. That is unavoidable. Secondly, there is an
emerging sleaze problem as some unethical companies scale up.

About both of these opinions he was unsurprisingly
dismissive. He cheerfully waved them off, like the eternal optimist he probably
is. I accept these as very real, like the over-analytical pessimist I am.

We must, therefore, agree to disagree and
hope for the best, because—to answer Peggy Lee’s melancholy question with a refrain
from funk-salsameisters Los amigos invisibles—that’s really all there is.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there.Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.